Fallen Earth Dev Journal With Art Director! Checkout Before and After Screenshots!

Tags

Fallen Earth will launch later this
week, allowing players to explore the apocalyptic wasteland near the Grand
Canyon after a virus has wiped out most of the population on the planet. Wonder
what happens to buildings with nobody around to slap that fresh coat of paint on
the house every 5 summers? We've received a new development journal with Fallen
Earth Art Director Chris Deavellar highlighting some of the things that were
done to give the game a truly apocalyptic feel! We've also included several new
screenshots in the journal; Enjoy!

Fallen Earth Overhauls Buildings

Journal
with Art Director, Chris Deavellar

When
a game has been in development as long as Fallen Earth has, legacy issues are
one of the largest pitfalls for artists and designers. When I became art
director on the project about seven months ago, I took a good, hard look at the
state of the art in the game.

In my
job as “the closer,” I've had the opportunity to evaluate and improve areas of
the game where I felt we were lacking visually. Working closely with the engine
designers (one of whom was my former lead artist), we have improved the
lighting, added normal mapped terrain, and we have improved the sky by replacing
the procedural clouds with a hand painted texture. We are working to make these
major improvements even better.

At
the close of these major projects, I knew that our buildings still needed work.
Over the years, we've amassed a huge library of buildings, and adding polish for
all of them would be a tremendous undertaking. After re-evaluating our process,
we have implemented several methods of improving the look of our buildings,
adding detail and actually improving performance.

Starting with houses, we looked at the problem from a couple of angles. Most
houses have a very similar makeup in their construction. We made a list of the
things one would typically see in a house: old electric outlets, roof supports,
stairs, railings, doors and windows, among other things.

We then made these assets and placed them on a single texture. Working on a single
texture allowed us to add a lot more detail to the additions while saving on
texture memory since these items were used in every house. To add the look of
destruction that is commonplace for our genre, we made a second texture map with
various types of broken walls, broken 2x4s, rotten plywood, and other rubble.
Since most houses use a similar construction, the elements of destruction could
also be consistent, giving us the opportunity to add more detail to them.

The
second challenge was to re-think our texture library. We had a very large
variety of textures, but many of them were redundant. Rather than continuing to
parse detail from all of them, we reduced our library to a bare minimum. With a
few good base textures, we began to add details. A wall texture, for example,
was given mold at the bottom, dripping water stains at the top, and some molding
and floorboards. If other colors or details are needed for future rooms, we now
have the ability to expand on the library without blowing our texture memory.

The
last major improvement was to look at the buildings as real-world structures,
considering their degradation over the years. The artists are taking a lot of
time to add in broken bricks and siding, busted walls and floors, and to make
these buildings look run down. Adding this kind of detail can be a laborious
process, but we can make improve speed and efficiency using a technique called
“kit bashing.” In kit bashing, we use pieces of other models repeatedly. In the
early stages of improving our structures, each detail is created from scratch,
keeping in mind that many of those details will be repurposed later in other
structures. Once a few buildings are complete, we repurpose pieces from them to
drop into another building. Broken brick walls, destroyed roofs, and decayed
siding are some of the different things we'll use between models to save time
while creating a great looking building.

Renovating our buildings and improving performance will take a while, but the results are
worth the effort. In the coming months we plan to continue revamping our
buildings. In addition to giving the game a substantial visual upgrade, we are
taking full advantage of some of the tech that is at our disposal. Players will
begin to notice the improvements as we continue to re-evaluate our method for
making structures.